Re: First draft of PG 19 release notes

On Sun, Nov 8, 2026 at 05:28:06PM +0100, Álvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2026-Nov-07, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
> > Imagine someone is running 18.10, and they want to upgrade to 19.7.
> > They will read all the release notes from 18.11 to 19.7, and it will
> > tell them to reindex twice.
>
> Well, if they use https://why-upgrade.depesz.com they won't. For
> instance,
> https://why-upgrade.depesz.com/show?from=16.14&to=18.6&keywords=
> this will show going from 16.4 to 17, then to 17.1, 17.2 [etc] until
> 17.6, and then it says to jump to 18. So the release notes from 17.7
> and up are not included, presumably because Depesz knows that these are
> duplicates.

Yeah, one logic is that once the next major release comes out, you can
stop reading the later minor releases because any change to 17.X would
also be changed in 18.X. I don't think we document this anywhere, and I
frankly had never considered it. However, it is _possible_ that 18.0
rewrote a facility in 17.0 and a fix was made only in a 17.X release
that happened after an 18.x release. However, since your are going to
18.X, it might not matter. I can't wrap my head around whether this
would always be safe.

I assume/hope https://why-upgrade.depesz.com compares compares commit
text and not just release dates.

> I don't think we _have_ to change the way our release notes are
> structured in order to cope with this. It may be nice to have a
> way to present them that matches what Depesz's page does, though.
> Or at least an explanation about how it would go.

Yeah, that is what I was thinking, but I have no idea how we would
approach this.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.